Game Day: Randomizing the Frontier

I’m running two D&D 5th Edition sandbox campaigns set in the World of GreyhawkObsidian Frontier (my Sunday campaign) and Broken Land (my lunchtime game). Both take place in a frontier town in a savage land overrun by monsters.

In another seventy years, the town — which will come to be known as Obsidian Bay — will be a thriving city-state. For now it’s closer to Deadwood, and I’ve got a lot of wilderness to populate.

I don’t have nearly as much time to world build as a I did when we first started adventuring in Obsidian Bay 18 years ago, so I’ve turned to the web to find random generators I can use to prep for adventures, spark ideas, and forecast the weather.

The Dungeon Master’s Guide for D&D 5th Edition is packed with great tables for randomly generating encounters and terrain. Credit: Ken Newquist

Dwarven Name Generator: Dwarves make up a significant percentage of Obsidian Bay’s population, so I’m constantly looking for new NPC names. This tool creates realistic dwarf names (Cael Thranadal) as well as fantasy ones (Ingada Armorsmith),

Random Horse Generator: The campaigns takes place on the frontier and the players will be spending a lot of time traveling the countryside looking for ruins, battling monsters, and generally trying not to get lost. A good horse is crucial to make sure those journeys pass quickly. This generator tells you horse coloration, defects, and personality traits.

Pen-and-Paper Tables

Random generators are great and all, but there’s nothing quite like cracking open the Dungeon Master’s Guide, finding the necessary table, and rolling some dice. I picked up the 5th Edition DMG at my local game store, which was one of Wizards of the Coast’s preferred partners, and thus, got the print edition of the book early. It’s crammed with every kind of table you might want, and I used as many as I could during Sunday’s game.

Random Outcomes

All of this virtual and real dice rolling yielded some new additions to the campaign.

Ignar Ironhound: Dwarven owner of Ironhound Kennels in Obsidian Bay, seller of fine riding and war dogs for the dwarven, halfling, and gnome communities. He’s a quiet man with a tendency to pace who’s utterly devoted to his dogs.

The Frowning Wolf Inn: A lower-end tavern popular with rangers and others more comfortable in the woods than in town. The owner is Cret, a retired ranger whose dire wolf is a constant presence in the bar and “frowns” (e.g. growls menacingly) at anyone who gets out of hand. Few do.

The Wyvrens: A street gang just getting established. Their leader is wiry Suel warrior named Svagnolf, The man has no honor, and was driven out of the lands of the Frost Barbarians for killing his brother.

Captain Treland Silvertooth: The result of a random encounter generated by the Pomarj encounter lists in the Greyhawk Glossography, and the “Bandit” entry in the 5e Monster Manual. That entry noted the bandit leader could also be a pirate captain, and before you knew it I was speaking in a cliched pirate accent and spinning a tale of starving pirates shipwrecked on the Pomarj coast trying (and failing) to hunt rabbits with scimitars.

The DMG has far, far more charts, and I’m looking forward to using all of them in the coming weeks. Someone pass me my dice.

Sign up for RADIATIONS Newsletter

About Nuketown

Nuketown is a speculative fiction website that’s been published continuously since 1996.

It’s publishing focus is articles, reviews and editorials about science fiction, fantasy, and horror with heroic overtones. It covers a variety of topics within the speculative fiction genre, including games, movies, soundtracks, books, and websites.